| Veteran |
03-03-2015 09:02 PM |
Container ships
Thillskier, I'm no expert on how merchies lose their loads, but I've heard it can happen from wave action or materiel failures and/or how they're secured to the deck. When waves come at you from all different directions, it's often called a "confused sea state", and there can be waves that are out of sync with the others that can magnify to huge sizes. Almost all my experience was search and rescue, (although we did do law enforcement too, i.e. lots of counter drug ops down south), I hoisted a good number of injured crewmen off large merchant vessels over the years. At least with a large merchant vessel, we had good visual references at night (before we started using NVG's routinely). One of the biggest challenges is hoisting people off sailboats, because they've got a mast trying to snag the hoist cable and yank you out of the air, (four of my mates were killed in 2012 this way in Hawaii during a training flight). There are ways to mitigate the risk, but it's never easy. It's much easier to take people directly out of the water than off a boat (by hoist method). As for the ship delivering the bikes, (the Hanjin), I think bikes are typically pretty secure in their individual shipping crates and doubly so when in a shipping container, so the bikes should be ok regardless of the sea-state. Shaken, not stirred. I like the enthusiasm displayed here for the bike and am eager to finish this tour and actually retire and do a lot more adventure riding. I'm seriously considering attending some of the RX3 ride plans I see people kicking around. Unfortunately, the contract I'm in doesn't expire until mid-August, (and I may extend until April 2016). BUT, I'm still looking forward to the Zongshen experience. We have a lot of Zongshens here, but no RX3's. I doubt there's a market in this country. Most bike riders here buy the bikes for use as a taxi and most guys who ride for fun are rich and import KTM's etc. So the poor guys who need bikes for income buy a $700 model and the rich guys who blast around outside the city buy a $6-12k bike, (because the rich here are ALL ABOUT showing their wealth). A $3500 bike doesn't have the market here....other than me. Having said all that, I was looking at a brand new Zongshen ZS-250-gy-2 (I think that's the model I was looking at), it's the Enduro looking model. I'm actually impressed with the quality. It beats the pants off all the other brand Chinese-indo bikes here, (I own a MAK 250- kind of a Honda Tornado copy). The plastics appear much more robust too. I'm a little concerned about the problems a couple of guys had with their RX3s in China when they had their bikes power washed and suffered some form of fuel delivery problems. Yeah, you shouldn't use a power washer on a bike as a rule, but a bike should still be able to handle it. We'll see.
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